Top 500 Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes (2023 Update)
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351. “We scarcely know how much of our pleasure and interest in life comes to us through our eyes until we have to do without them; and part of that pleasure is that the eyes can choose where to look. But the ears can’t choose where to listen.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

352. “Reason is a faculty far larger than mere objective force. When either the political or the scientific discourse announces itself as the voice of reason, it is playing God, and should be spanked and stood in the corner.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

353. “Art is not a horse race. Literature is not the Olympics. The hell with The Great American Novel. We have all the great novels we need right now – and right now some man or woman is writing a new one we won’t know we needed till we read it.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

354. “The living tongue that tells the word, the living ear that hears it, bind and bond us in the communion we long for in the silence of our inner solitude.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

355. “There is no kingdom like the forests.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

356. “The fact is, the only time a man is really and entirely a man is when he’s just had a woman or just killed another man. That wasn’t original, he’d read it in some old books; but it was true. That was why he liked to imagine scenes like that. Even if the creechies weren’t actually men.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

357. “There are two kinds of knowledge, local and universal.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

358. “Genre fiction was looked at as a ghetto, but I wonder now if realist fiction, sealing itself off in the glum suburbs of a dysfunctional society, denying the use of imagination, was the ghetto.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

359. “I know perfectly well he’s a god, too. But what I think is he’ll be much godlier after he’s dead.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

360. “The natural, proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag. A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings. A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

361. “If civilization has an opposite, it is war.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

362. “Despair speaks evenly, in a quiet voice.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

363. “In a State, even a democracy, where power is hierarchic, how can you prevent the storage of information from becoming yet another source of power to the powerful – another piston in the great machine?”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

364. “But I, who am old, who have done what I must do, who stand in the daylight facing my own death, the end of all possibility, I know that there is only one power that is real and worth the having. And that is the power, not to take, but to accept.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

365. “It is our suffering that brings us together.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

366. “Had his fear, in fact, been the personal fear that Selver might having learnt the racial hatred, reject him and treat him not as you but as one of them.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

367. “When I’m writing I don’t dream much; it’s like the dreaming gets used in the writing.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

368. “To see that your life is a story while you’re in the middle of living it may be a help to living it well.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

369. “Very seldom do you come upon a space, a time like this, between act and act, when you may stop and simply be.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

370. “Living, being in the world, was a much greater and stranger thing than she had ever dreamed.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

371. “When in the Land of Property think like a propertarian. Dress like one, eat like one, act like one, be one.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

372. “The interplay of the aesthetic with the erotic is complex. The peacock’s tail is beautiful to us, sexy to the peahen. Beauty and sexual attractiveness overlap, coincide. They may be deeply related. I think they should not be confused.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

373. “How rich we are in knowledge, and in all that lies around us yet to learn. Billionaires, all of us.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

374. “Art, like sex, cannot be carried on indefinitely solo; after all, they have the same enemy, sterility.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

375. “Age and illness made one a dualist.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

376. “O foolish writer. Now moves. Even in storytime, dreamtime, once-upon-a-time, now isn’t then.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

377. “We weren’t cruel, we were ignorant, foolish. Children are ignorant and foolish. But they learn. If they are given a chance to learn.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

378. “Secondhand experience breaks down a block from the car lot.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

379. “How can people be anything but ignorant when knowledge isn’t saved, isn’t taught?”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

380. “Oh, never and forever aren’t for mortals, love. But we won’t be parted till I know it’s right that we part.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

381. “The more defensive a society, the more conformist.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

382. “No man, no power, can bind the action of wizardry or still the words of power. For they are the very words of Making, and one who could silence them could unmake the world.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

383. “The novelist’s business is lying.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

384. “There is not much you can say about a baby unless you are talking with its father or another mother or nurse; infants are not part of the realm of ordinary language, talk is inadequate to them as they are inadequate to talk.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

385. “There is no information about corporations. There is only disinformation.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

386. “Words are events, they do things, change things. They transform both speaker and hearer; they feed energy back and forth and amplify it. They feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

387. “Suffering is dysfunctional, except as a bodily warning against danger. Psychologically and socially it’s merely destructive.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

388. “It is hard, I found, to be called traitor. Strange how hard it is, for it’s an easy name to call another man.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

389. “The daily routine of most adults is so heavy and artificial that we are closed off to much of the world. We have to do this in order to get our work done. I think one purpose of art is to get us out of those routines. When we hear music or poetry or stories, the world opens up again.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

390. “The historic function of a Senator from Oregon is to drive all the other Senators mad.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

391. “I think the imagination is the single most useful tool mankind possesses. It beats the opposable thumb. I can imagine living without my thumbs, but not without my imagination. I.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

392. “Heathen” is merely a word for somebody who knows a different sacredness than you know.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

393. “Honorifics and meaningless ritual phrases of greeting, leave-taking, permission-asking, and false gratitude, please, thank you, you’re welcome, goodbye, fossil relics of primitive hypocrisy – all were stumbling blocks to truthfulness between producer-consumers.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

394. “A man would know the end he goes to, but he cannot know it if he does not turn, and return to his beginning, and hold that beginning in his being.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

395. “Where, then, is Truth?” declaimed Bedap, and yawned. “In the hill one happens to be sitting on,” said Tirin.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

396. “A man can endure the entire weight of the universe for eighty years. It is unreality that he cannot bear.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

397. “The unconscious mind is coextensive with the universe.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

398. “History must be what we have escaped from. It is what we were, not what we are. History is what we need never do again.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

399. “You know, I don’t think a lot about why one book connects with its readers and another doesn’t. Probably because I don’t want to start thinking, “Am I popular?” I spent way too much time thinking about that in high school.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

400. “Life rises out of death, death rises out of life; in being opposite they yearn to each other, they give birth to each other and are forever reborn. And with them, all is reborn, the flower of the apple tree, the light of the stars. In life is death. In death is rebirth. What then is life without death? Life unchanging, everlasting, eternal?-What is it but death-death without rebirth?”

— Ursula K. Le Guin